


Serpent of July (outtakes)

by orphan_account



Series: Serpent of July [2]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, graphic depictions of asgardian theater
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-22 01:17:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/907183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Segments of a blood-spattered, long-ass epic love story I accidentally deleted. Sigyn follows her father's trade and becomes a successful thespian. Loki is general and viceroy and spends thousands upon thousands of words in the battlefield for the glory of Asgard. Together they carry out an illicit affair that tackles a thousand and one debates on gender roles. Sigyn enters an arranged marriage with another man (surprise, surprise Theoric)  and moves out in the less cultivated borders with him. Loki at first takes him under his wind, but then decides to kill him. </p>
<p>After all the drama Loki moves also to the borders and lives there with Sigyn. They have one child and live happily ever after until Thor becomes King and sends Loki to Jotunheim as a steward. Sigyn is forced into another arranged marriage with Tyr.</p>
<p>A lot of stuff happen and then Tyr and Loki team up and overthrow Thor. Loki has his son kill Thor's son thus triggering some horrible karmic punishment.</p>
<p>I was going to finish it but then I said "too many men", "all this blood", "and how does one write sex again?". I found segments of it in some long forgotten backup file. It had some interesting writing so-</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They went to a spectacle outside the citadel that night; a comedy of situations that the troupe of a friend performed at a newly built venue, an hour’s walk from the Royal Theater. The venue was small- it resembled more of a feasting hall in its size than a theater-, but the performers were all very enthusiastic and the crowd quite erudite, and so the night passed with some delightful sophistication.

When the comedy was over, her friend invited his cousin on stage, quite surprisingly, and after introducing her, bid her to end their night with a more solemn piece, as it was the custom at the time. She danced the “Willow and the Flame when the Goddess hanged herself", which was a very difficult dance. The musicians were not very good, so the audience asked them to be silent and soon her musical score was silence and the occasional creak of the stage beneath her steps.

The dance was only five minutes, or so, and even the dancer who had created it, had only danced it a dozen times due to its demanding nature. Espeacially when willow, flame, the goddess and the act of hanging became one character on stage, during the climax of the dance.

She made a vivid rotation as the playful flame and then as she came to face the audience her hands went slowly up, as the branches of the tree and descended again to frame her face, in the display of the ever falling goddess. When her body rested in its gravity, poised like a needle on the ground, the hanging was complete. The audience was very silent and some were crying when it was finished. They only broke to thunderous applause when she, flushed and pleased from her performance, walked to the edge of the stage and took a bow- demanding her reward.

To him it was like a blow. In his ten year absence he had forgotten the magical moments of transformation and catharsis the stage offered. And the red, light figure his cousin cut in the warm darkness of the theater was a perfect picture of comfort in the face of devastating disaster. He relaxed in his seat with his head turned to the gilded ceiling as the applause helped dispell the solemnity and bring cheer back into the night.

Her father had succeeded after all in transforming her into the perfect performer. She was not very well-known at the time, but she would be in the future. She already had the love and respect of her colleagues and friends…She had friends who invited her to their spectacles, bid her take the stage in the side entertainments. They applauded freely and caringly. Her father’s friends were all looking to become her patrons and investors. She was liked and it came out in her performance.

After she came down from the stage, the scenery and stage were cleared away and great tables were brought in. A wonderful feast followed. There she introduced him to her friends- some of them enjoyed the patronage of his parents- and they all delighted him with anecdotes from their profession and compliments on his education.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scene with Loki walking in a forest, written in two different manners

Crown prince. "A title with no substance" he thought. 

Snow was falling from the sky and the cold gripped everything like a living thing. He could feel it just outside his lips. Their breaths rose feebly in the air in great vapours that dissipated again with the cold. Was it so easy to be heartbroken? A simple refusal. He closed his eyes and didn't bother to will the silent tears away. The horse walked with its great head bowed. All he could think to himself was "Why?" And it gripped him the same as the cold. Uncaring and relentless, looking to snatch the life out of him. His life seemed to him at that point destined to fall on the great fire of things and wither and blacken without ever catching on that wonderful blaze. 

His heart would remain forever indifferent to true passion. He would slay, and burn, and win for Asgard. For Thor. His deeds would be a banner to be cast down, tribute, bloody and victorious, at his brother's kingly feet. His mother would have her black prince, her victory over him. And of his father, the king? Odin had taken the bright thread of Loki's life to gift to Thor like so many magical and mysterious weapons. The spear of Asgard and the horned serpent. The carnation and the venomous tooth. All burried under the winter snow.

 

..........

 

He was beginning to see it in others. How their faces became stern in his presence- how everyone minded what they were saying. How rumour of his ruthlessness set a more becoming stage for his gentleness. As if what Loki thought himself to naturally be was a sliver of hardly redeeming light in a dark and suspicious being. 

As his horse trotted on a bed of fallen leaves, blackened from the early frost, he thought himself as brittle as piece of paper hitting a fire so great that it turns to ash before it burns. Would he spent a lifetime of brittleness when all the while the bearest whistle of wind could blow him away. Would he not at least first burn with a bright flame to make his presence known in the dark? 

He would try and say that he was not a melodramatic being, but in this autumn dawn, black and white with the first hint of winter, life seemed to retreat on her promises to him.

His mare came to a sudden stop as if reading his thoughts and through the air permeated the faintest scent of blood. He dismounted and took hold of his horse's reins. He walked cautiously- his and the mare's legs submerging deep into the leaves with a rich sound amplified by the silence. All the forest had shed its foliage and was in such beautiful deceptive stillness, broken only with the occasional chirp or flap of wing.

In the distance a woman trod silently on the fallen leaves with only the faint rustle of her long train to accompany her steps. Clad in a hooded cloak and holding a lantern to illuminate the hazy atmosphere ahead she made for a figure dark- like the spatter of blood on snow. Loki held his breath. He thought he had seen that particular costume again somewhere before- perhaps a religious drama. And with that it came to him the ghost of a memory of ascending voices enveloping him. And with this a very light, almost dust-like snow began to fall. 

The lady lifted her head towards the sky- the light of the lantern illuminating in a warm glow the features of her face- and Loki recognized his cousin. Not from the paleness of her face and the dark contrast of her eyebrows, but from the quiet reverie of her features as she brought a palm up to catch the snowflakes that descended around her. Her features were schooled in such solemnity that she might as well be pondering all things dark and despairing about life.

"Is it not dangerous to wander in the forest at such an early hour?"

She turned and looked at him as if she had only just seen him, despite the few paces that seperated them. 

"I am going home." she answered and put out the flame in her lantern.

Loki finally felt as if some great magic had been summoned here, because suddenly he began burning again. Not with the silent creeping heat that ate him away, but with a bright, exuberant flame that promised to last ages until the last ember. Loki looked at her face that reminded him so keenly of his own and felt more than ever that Sigyn's face mirrored his, because their souls were alike. 

He envied her for being whomever she chose while he could only stand aside, impotently, and just be Loki. It seemed such a waste of his person. She put her arms around him and he touched his profile to hers, holding her back, while her heart fluttered warm in her chest in so that Loki felt he could reach through her cloak and hold it in his hand like a warm flame. When they parted she asked: "Are your eyes wet because of the cold, cousin?" and wiped a tear. "Yes" he answered, leaning to kiss her cheek in the most virtuous way he could muster. A raven cawed in the distance and she, holding his hand still pressed on her face, kissed his thumb. The raven cawed again. Her hood had fallen back and snowflakes had been caught up in her hair.

"You smell of blood." he said. She seemed to be startled at that. There was a pause. 

"I miscarried" 

She said it in that even tone that had made her famous for her lyrical poetry readings. And she took his hand and guided it to her womb, where it was so warm. Even though they had been apart, in that moment it felt like they had never exited the privacy of their affair. It seemed anywhere they were, there was this intimacy following them. And Loki remembered watching the spilled ink of her hair on a white pillow in the morning light. Not something he had been observing, but rather an instant that seemed to condense in its brevity their entire life together. A trivial and small memory, remembered because of the falling snow and the murmur of a sad song.

"I will take you home."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hela visits Loki in his dreams

The woman then turned to him and caught his face between her hands. She had suddenly become a giantess and Loki had to look up to gaze into her empty eyes that still shone as powerfully as suns. He tried to run, but her very hands seemed to go into his ears and from there straight into his brain, where they touched on some great cord of his being in so that he felt the molecules he was made of, vibrate to the point of breaking. And he was falling apart, again and again as if in a thousand different deaths with a long strangled howl that seemed to sound like an angry "What am I?"   
"Father" she said. "Why are you sad? Should my brother come here would I treat him any less than a prince's son? He will eat at my table and the dead will love him like a lonely star in the sky. I await for him and you and your wife as well. You are my kin and you will be no less than me in the realm of the dead at the end of your days."

**Author's Note:**

> I am doing this as a graphic novel project (it will be finished by Thor 12, I reckon), anyone who is interested to have a look here you go:
> 
> http://serpent-of-july.tumblr.com/


End file.
